Breaking the culture siege

Posted by Cory Bernardi22062sc on July 19, 2017

I am writing this week’s comment at 35,000 feet en route to Townsville in Northern Queensland. It’s the final stop on a speaking tour discussing our nation and the role all of us can play in shaping its future.

Every event has been a full house, suggesting that many Australians are truly searching for a better way.

And a better way isn’t just the catchy three word slogan of Australian Conservatives. It is both a mission statement and an aspiration. It gives hope to the many who know that whatever is going on now doesn’t seem to be working for them or the country.

Whatever metric you choose, the body politic is failing the Australian people. Six Prime Ministers in ten years, declining educational standards, law and order problems, skyrocketing utility prices, an explosion of national debt… I could go on but I am sure you get the picture.

Put simply, the more the political class legislate to fix things the worse things seem to get. We need to change that.

The Australian Conservatives will apply our uniting principles to the questions and challenges confronting us and always seek to find a better way.

As I told the crowd of over 450 people in Brisbane last night, it doesn’t mean any one of us has all the answers. Individually, we bring our unique gifts and skills and talents into the battle of ideas. But together, those gifts complement each other and strengthen our capabilities. Through working together, our individual differences become a source of strength rather than isolation.

That’s what being a community is all about. It’s that sense of belonging and contributing to something bigger than oneself that strengthens families, clubs, cities and nations. It strengthens political parties too.

However, all communities need ties that bind. They need the thread of continuity that runs through all so that we may be drawn together.

At the most basic level that thread is familial. In a political party it is idea, vision and values. As a nation, it is culture.

Culture is our language, our traditions, our laws and our expectations of each other. It emerges over successive generations, each one building upon the previous, bringing us ever closer.

Except that’s not what’s happening now. There is a new force at work within our culture. It isn’t of us and it isn’t working for us. Many refer to it as globalisation but it can take on many monikers.

Despite the reckoning of many pundits, globalisation isn’t about free trade or international markets. Those forces can and do work to our advantage. They provide local businesses with export opportunities and local consumers with a broader range of more competitively-priced goods.

Rather, globalisation is a direct attack on our national sovereignty and self-determination.

The best example is the United Nations. Formed in 1945 for the purpose of preventing another world war through dialogue, it now sees itself as a quasi-world government.

It dictates refugee policy, spruiks the great global warming scam, redefines marriage, smoking policy and so many other virtue-signalling and identity-politics agendas that it has simply become a vehicle for the globalists to push their view.

The UN’s stacked resolutions and dodgy reports are used by political outfits like the Greens to undermine our domestic policy agenda in favour of someone else’s.

These people truly believe they are the enlightened powers that should be running a world of open borders and wealth redistribution in order to save us all. Perhaps that should be ‘enslave’ us all.

It’s time for that to change. We need to reassert our self-determination. That means we need to revisit the treaties, agreements and pacts of decades past to make sure they are working in our interest.

Let’s review them to see if they are achieving what we thought they would. We could start with the UNHCR refugee treaty. It was written in 1951 and the driving forces and key players have changed since then.

Just as every prudent person would insist that every contract has a termination or review date, so too should we insist on reviewing our government’s international agreements at regular intervals.

It will help ensure a check is kept on the agenda that is intent on diminishing, rather than strengthening Australia.